Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Her Majesty’s Theatre. 18 Jun 2022
Cabaret is an interesting type of entertainment to describe. In its modern form, it originated in Paris (arguably) in the late 1800s in the Montmartre area. It largely comprised stand-up comedians, actors, vaudevillians, and musicians all poking fun and thumbing their collective noses at the establishment. There was often a subversive element in what they did, sang and said, and this was particularly evident in German cabaret during the Weimar period of the 1920s. Cabaret was often held in intimate venues with the audience seated at tables in close proximity to the performers, but this is less common in today’s mass entertainment market and in festivals that ostensibly celebrate the cabaret genre.
At its best, cabaret is funny, subversive (with as many sacred cows being irreverently and mercilessly slaughtered as possible), energetic, audacious, and, above all, abundant with quality music and well-sung chansons! Meow Meow’s appropriately named cabaret show Pandemonium has all those features, in spades!
Meow Meow, aka Melissa Madden Gray, is originally from Canberra, but having performed in diverse major international venues to rave reviews, the world is truly her stage. She has exquisite comic timing and physicality, and a superb singing voice that is fuelled by top-notch technique, excellent diction and enviable pronunciation across a number of languages. She has a sensual stage presence that demands (and gets) your full attention. She is magnetic.
Meow Meow begins the show with a false-start: she first appears on one of the theatre’s balconies, and ‘realising’ she is in the wrong place attempts to climb down to the stage with her bag of costumes and various stage accoutrements. Eventually she makes her way to the stage and en route enlists the help of several members of the audience to help her change into a costume. She explains that she is “running on reduced circumstances” – blame COVID lockdowns – and she needs to get help where she can! This routine alone is almost worth the price of the ticket, especially when one of them takes out his pen knife to help sever a pesky strap! Meow Meow’s rib-tickling riposte is quick and …. cutting!
Having taken to the stage, it is clear that Meow Meow wants to invoke the intimacy of traditional cabaret and involve her audience as much as possible. Audience participation can often go down like the proverbial lead brick, but in Meow Meow’s seasoned hands, men in the audience veritably clamour to volunteer their services, although they are invariably ill-suited (or incapable!) for what they are asked to do, even in their “own time”! It’s all part of her formula, and it is oh so funny and will never get ‘old’!
Meow Meow performs a wide range of songs from various cabaret traditions, especially French and German, and is backed by the excellence and might of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra expertly conducted by Nicholas Buc. The stage of Her Majesty’s is jam-packed, and the lighting design and sound engineering exposes it and everyone in … full majesty!
Meow Meow’s performances of Ne me quitte pas by Jacque Brel, and Surabaya-Johnny by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht were sublime. Her rendition of the 1931 Weimar Republic classic It's All a Swindle (Alles Schwindel) by Mischa Spoliansky and Marcellus gave us a poignant reminder of what we have all endured through the recent state and federal elections.
Meow Meow doesn’t just sing from the traditional canon of cabaret songs. Tonight’s song list also included her own compositions, such as the hauntingly poignant Mon homme marié (My Married Man) and Hotel Amour that she co-wrote with Thomas M Lauderdale. Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees also features, and Meow Meow channels the song’s central character: her presentation is achingly beautiful.
And then there’s her performance in several languages of the 1960 hit Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini by Paul Vance and Lee Pockriss, but there’s nothing shy about her act. It ended in, well, pandemonium with the members of the orchestra all throwing their scores into the air, and the audience howled with laughter.
Her version of Be Careful by Patty Griffin underscores the song’s essential message about female vulnerability, and it speaks to the men in the audience as much as it does to the women. It is a seminal moment in the concert.
Throughout, the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra is at the top of its game, and they clearly enjoy the experience of performing with Meow Meow, as opposed to playing for her and accompanying her own trio. Indeed, she orchestrates a wonderfully amusing entrance of the orchestra to kick off the send half: entering one-by-one (yes, it did take some time!) they individually ‘bowed’ with great humour and flourish. They take centre stage, and relish the occasion, but the night belongs to Melissa Madden Gray and her alter ego Meow Meow.
Make sure you see a Meow Meow concert when the occasion next presents itself. It’s one of those things you simply must do before you die…with laughter!
Kym Clayton
When: Closed
Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Dunstan Playhouse. 17 Jun 2022
Louise Blackwell is a well known musical Francophile around Adelaide’s live scene. Partnered with her exquisite band The French Set, Blackwell has extolled the joys of French song to live music lovers with great, committed passion.
Louise Blackwell – Love on the Left Bank is her deep, profound, bravura exposition and tribute to the life of France’s most profoundly influential chanteuse of song and culture post WWII - Juliette Grèco.
Director Catherine Fitzgerald and Musical Director/Arrangements Mark Ferguson provide Blackwell with perfect structural support needed, allowing her to offer a sublimely svelte, smooth moving, thought provoking, captivating and emotionally layered experience to an audience, who were enraptured.
Enraptured by an artist looking like Grèco but much more importantly, delivering the goods vocally, politically and emotionally. Pick a song, the popular ones are there; Sous Le ciel de Paris, Dèshabillez Moi to mention two. Blackwell’s performance is staggering in its command of emotion, sensibility and vocal prowess that follows Grèco’s lead with room for her own voice in emulating her.
Fitzgerald’s direction ensures a smooth flowing ebb of movement and energy from Blackwell and band, and not just physically. The subtle transitions from Blackwell narrating, to Blackwell as Grèco speaking are masterful. Blackwell’s every gesture and movement around the stage perfectly partners her beautiful narrative of Grèco’s life with an intensity that hits home with thoughtful, not brutal, gravitas, That gravitas is backed up musically by a band that is pitch perfect, exquisite in its taut, yet gently textured layering of strings and brass.
David O’Brien
When: Closed
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Spiegeltent. 16 Jun 2022
Somewhere near the close of the last century Paul McDermott was discovering the joys of a hidden side to Adelaide via a late night session at the legendary 1990s venue the Silvermine, in suburban Glen Osmond.
McDermott immortalised his experience in the song On The Inside (Adelaide looks beautiful tonight), a number which closed the show in customary style, since McDermott and sidekick (“my plus one”) have taken to ushering the audience outside of whichever venue they’re in, performing a little impromptu ‘extra’, as they did last Fringe.
Time seems to be a theme in this review, and it’s as good a theme as any. The audience was modest sized for an early evening opening night, and commented upon by McDermott in less than flattering terms. He didn’t mention the popularity of faux leopard skin print, so that was a plus. As our host, he was flinty eyed and salty, not murderous and vituperative as he was last year. Paul McDermott needs a target to focus his vitriol upon, and in the absence of last year’s villain Scott Morrison, that meant half-hearted jabs at the audience. It wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t very passionate.
Which brings us to the Funhouse; McDermott played the MC, and much of the show was about the additional performers. I’m not sure that’s what the audience signed on for. There was muted applause for Phyllma Box, a tattooed Drag Queen; quite a bit more for standup comedian Dilruk Jayasinha; and bemused shrugs for Captain Ruin. Were they there simply to establish the shows’ ‘cabaret’ credentials, or because there wasn’t much to the show itself?
Not to condemn with faint praise, but Box was a by the numbers performer (synching to Dead Or Alive’s Spin Me Around is quite 1990s), who used nine or ten costume changes in what became the least surprising reveal ever for a Drag Queen strip. Jayasinha turned a Melbourne lockdown routine into an ode to wanking and autofellation, which is nice for him, and Ruin roller-skated and escaped from a straitjacket. I know. Amazing!
Ruin also closed out the evening’s guest performances with a swinging rendition of a man with a bowling ball (yes, a big one) swinging from his penis. It’s a trick I haven’t seen since the Jim Rose Circus made it a party specialty about 25 years ago, and I hoped never to see it again.
So this show was much more than just McDermott and his faithful sidekick running through some songs. And yet, it was also so much less. After all, we heard only sparingly from McDermott as MC for the night, and were rewarded with a mere four songs. Song For Karens was used to sledge an audience member, Pete Evans Magic Machine was used to sledge the nutter and paleo TV chef, Young Fascists In Love was without a target, and Magic Machine was largely unchanged from the song we’d heard 15 months earlier when it had been reprised outside the Rhino Room by McDermott and Glen Moorhouse for their footpath encore. This despite there being a three piece band tonight, so the question ‘why?’ seems entirely apt.
Why now? McDermott needs a target and the show suffers when he doesn’t have one to pour scorn upon. Does he turn his attention to things which pleased him when he was younger? That part of the show seemed steeped in the 1990s, and his audience (most of us over 50) were broadly onside, but where was this going to take us in terms of his incisive humour?
This was not a bad show, not at all, although as a review it sounds dismissive. McDermott is too canny, too clever an observer not to realise at the moment he is a rebel without a cause.
Alex Wheaton
When: 16 to 25 Jun
Where: The Spiegeltent
Bookings: adelaidecabaretfestival.com.au
The Adelaide Repertory Theatre. Arts Theatre. 16 Jun 2022
MGM has nothing on the cast of thousands involved in this Alan Bennett history drama.
The stage of The Arts is a spectacle of red coats, insignia, and period wigs. There are, indeed, Whigs in wigs and also Tories. Not to mention a king and queen and assorted attendants, valets, and doctors. The costuming of the show is an achievement in itself and the backstage must be swarming with dressers whisking the actors through their changes.
As the title suggests, this play tells about the mental illness of George III with a complaint known as porphyria but latterly suspected to be bipolar disorder. As playwright Alan Bennett diagnoses the King for this partly-fictionalised play, it was the former ailment which is accompanied by a diversity of difficult symptoms such as fevers and chills, chest pains, constipation, itches, and purple urine.
With his signature comedic touch, Bennett has the poor King attended by a group of specialist doctors who plague him with torturous treatments. It is gently light relief and, indeed, there are a few laughs in assorted characterisations and quips. But mental illness itself is miserable and, as George III, Lindsay Dunn takes the audience into some dark and desperate places. In something of a bravura performance, Dunn takes the hapless king from blithe pukka authority through a decline of utter verbosity and irrationality and into a wilderness of escaped reality. It is a wild and cumbersome script, a huge ask of an actor, and Dunn’s mastery of it is truly impressive.
Around him is a royal court trying to stay out of disarray, a loyal German queen, and a loathed decadent oldest son who is being thrust towards the position of Regent by the strategising politicians of the day. The action zaps from royal household to bellowing parliament to doctors and, the king, the king, the king.
Actors carry added masks to create the full-scale rabble of Parliament and, under the direction of Angela Short, they sound all too familiar. Fashions may change but political shenanigans remain ever pushy, pithy, and pungent.
Short has rounded up some of Adelaide’s finest in the support line-up and they seem to be having a very good time on stage with their wigs and period costumes, poses and pretentions. There’re about forty in the cast all told. Kate Anolak is particularly endearing as the German queen with Rebecca Kemp an agreeable power beside her. They get the best frocks, too.
Tom Tassone is farcically foppish as the self-indulgent Prince of Wales while, in a role with very few words, Jamie Wright holds his own beside him with a deliciously bemused reactive characterisation of the Duke of York. It is hard to take one’s eyes off him. Meanwhile, Joshua Coldwell, Peter Davies and Anthony Vawser make a merry meal of the assorted quacks with their blistering and bleeding and stools and rising gout. Leighton Vogt and Steve Marvanek offer portrayals of wiley politics, Jack Robins also with Maxwell Whigham right in there and, well, a mass of exquisitely competent women fulfilling myriad male roles: Jenny Allen, Leah Lowe, Rose Harvey, Heather Riley, Lucy Johnson, Chelsea Lancione among them with Jenny Allard partnering wittily with Rose Vallen as the pushy political provincials.
The set is simple but eminently regal - a stage divided into three sections, two with red velvet curtains opening onto the households of the king and the regent and a central raised orange curtain for affairs of state. The king and queen roll in and out on a mighty royal bedstead. Doctors scamper about with chamber pots. A chambermaid flourishes a bed-warmer. Desks come and go as does the cruel chair of unseated power. Magnificent snatches of Handel punctuate the scenes; King George’s favourite composer don’t you know, what-what, and oh so regal and beautiful it is. Just the icing on a lavish period cake.
Samela Harris
When: 16 to 22 Jun
Where: Arts Theatre
Bookings: adelaiderep.com or 8212 5777
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Spiegeltent. 11 Jun 2022
This is the oddest out-there show in the CabFest.
It is a not-show show.
It is a DIY art class.
And isn’t it lovely there in the Spiegeltent, comfortably warm on a cold winter’s day? Surrounded by charming Festival attendants.
Musicians play wallpaper jazz as we would-bes take our seats in a semi-circle.
The stage is adorned by a chaise longue, a piano, a pot of fern, a lamp, and a bentwood chair.
It’s a lovely setting.
Everyone gets a board, paper, a pencil, and a piece of charcoal and then most agreeable artist, Ruby Chew, encourages the would-be artists to sketch the very lovely Burlesque Queen Letitia Stitch.
Ruby does not want to push the free flow of her students. She advises more than demonstrates. She makes it just a bit harder as we go along. Single-line. Opposite hand. Heavens above, one works better with the wrong hand. Which says a lot about the aptitude of the student. People compare works. They are pretty dire. Laughs.
Our gorgeous model changes pose. Oh, my, doesn’t she have a good haircut. Lovely linear body in slimline white ruffled dress. Drawn thrice now from the rear. Hmm.
Cabaret artiste Rosie Russell comes along and adds some creamy vocals.
And the band plays on.
And, if one is proud of one’s work, there’s a can of fixative to spray on the charcoal before one leaves.
Maybe someone discovered unknown aptitude.
Some of us will keep the day job.
Samela Harris
When: 12 and 25 Jun
Where: The Spiegeltent
Bookings: adelaidecabaretfestival.com.au